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[Ivefan]

-snip-

Im not saying its true, But by going by, say standard army structure, you start out alone and either join or employ others.
If you employ others, then you're basically a squad leader and lets say that one squad is 10 soldiers and one leader(i.e. You).
But now you employ another 5 guys and go over that limit so you designate another guy as leader for that squad but your fighting force is still to small to make use of higher ranks and thus the control interface would stay as it were for controlling the lone squad.
But your force grows to nine squads, and controlling all your men gets unwieldy. So now you put two men, each in charge of three squads, which you give orders to while you control the remaining three.

Later when your army gets large enough you'll just send out orders to your officers.

Atleast i assume something like this, If URR can get the A.I intelligent enough to not require direct intervention at all times.

[Leatra]

I think he is talking about counties, duchies, kingdoms, empires and vassals who manage them like the way Paradox done it in Crusader Kings. You know, vassals rebel, kings assassinate vassals who are not loyal, civil wars start when a new heir appears, vassals plot the downfall of the tyrant king, vassals have their own influence, etc.

[monk12]

have a strategy game where you're actually a player character, rather than an omniscient commander?

This actually touches on one of my own ideas for a game (my own in the sense that nobody else who's thought it has followed through, anyway.) That is, instead of having perfect view of the battlefield you only have view of whatever is in line of sight, and only have direct control of units in earshot. You knowledge of the rest of the map would be based on scouting reports your other commanders gave you, and would be noted as being "x turns out of date" so you have a better chance to try and predict enemy movements. If you wanted to alter the battle plan mid-engagement you'd have to send messengers to those commanders, who may or may not disregard or alter those orders based on their own assessment of the engagement (they won't come to reinforce you if they're holding off a surprise rear assault, for example, and will instead ask you for help!)

"Their own assessment" of the engagement is the kicker, and would involve the commander's skill as a leader, personality traits, and perhaps a bit of how much he likes you/the person he's ordered to bail out. A big part of the game becomes cultivating a good staff of commanders you work well with, and matching up those commanders with the types of units and assignments they are best suited for. This then leads into a meta-game of recruiting/promoting promising officers, perhaps competing with other factions for talent. And intra-faction competition would be interesting as well- all kinds of possibilities there.


Re:Devblog, whee deities!

[Clownmite]

have a strategy game where you're actually a player character, rather than an omniscient commander?

This actually touches on one of my own ideas for a game (my own in the sense that nobody else who's thought it has followed through, anyway.) That is, instead of having perfect view of the battlefield you only have view of whatever is in line of sight, and only have direct control of units in earshot. You knowledge of the rest of the map would be based on scouting reports your other commanders gave you, and would be noted as being "x turns out of date" so you have a better chance to try and predict enemy movements. If you wanted to alter the battle plan mid-engagement you'd have to send messengers to those commanders, who may or may not disregard or alter those orders based on their own assessment of the engagement (they won't come to reinforce you if they're holding off a surprise rear assault, for example, and will instead ask you for help!)

"Their own assessment" of the engagement is the kicker, and would involve the commander's skill as a leader, personality traits, and perhaps a bit of how much he likes you/the person he's ordered to bail out. A big part of the game becomes cultivating a good staff of commanders you work well with, and matching up those commanders with the types of units and assignments they are best suited for.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly how this game will work. The developer's stated that you'll need to send runners to your lieutenants in order to deliver orders in the middle of battle, and the lieutenants can override their orders if they think things aren't going well.

[monk12]

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

...English is not my first language, and I might have been kind of obscure. What I meant was that with the town genning system like similar to DF, it will be kind of hard to put all the management stuff inside. I should have said making it more like Mount & Blade style would be sort of better for that. Trading / recruiting / arming soldiers etcetera for your army consisted of one thousand men df style can quite.. you know, break the immersion. Running around from building to building as a commander to get a few hundred breastplates somehow reminds me of Monty Python and the holy grail. Now that I think of it, I might have entirely misjudged your intention... and I have nothing against the character based system, In fact I'm dying to try the alpha release out just because of it.

Anyways, that minimap looks wicked. Keep up the good work

Ah, no worries - that makes a lot more sense now . The town generation system I'm working on (which you may see an early version of in the alpha) is linked to the histories generated for the world; towns start off with vital buildings and grow from there. Ha, yes - you won't have to do all the running. If you're a general, you can certainly just get others to go around collecting troops, raising money, etc. If you enlist in an army, a job might be to go around and collect troops, but there will be others doing the same thing at the same time. Anyway, cheers!

Im not saying its true, But by going by, say standard army structure, you start out alone and either join or employ others.
If you employ others, then you're basically a squad leader and lets say that one squad is 10 soldiers and one leader(i.e. You).
But now you employ another 5 guys and go over that limit so you designate another guy as leader for that squad but your fighting force is still to small to make use of higher ranks and thus the control interface would stay as it were for controlling the lone squad.
But your force grows to nine squads, and controlling all your men gets unwieldy. So now you put two men, each in charge of three squads, which you give orders to while you control the remaining three.

Later when your army gets large enough you'll just send out orders to your officers.

Atleast i assume something like this, If URR can get the A.I intelligent enough to not require direct intervention at all times.

Units consist of twelve creatures, and armies can have a large number of units (within a high limit of units). If you're in charge, you basically command each squad, and that gets carried out. If it gets particularly large, you might be able to assign people to handling each squad; not sure yet. If you're in charge of a unit, orders come down to you and you're free to carry them out as you see fit. In practicing with the basic squad programming at the moment, squads as a whole are... mildly competent at deciding when to attack, fall back, etc, but it needs a lot more work. The trickiest part is getting them to accurately assess what part of the enemy is coming for them, and what part isn't; maybe trivial for a human, but tricky for AI. Still, it's definitely coming along.

I think he is talking about counties, duchies, kingdoms, empires and vassals who manage them like the way Paradox done it in Crusader Kings. You know, vassals rebel, kings assassinate vassals who are not loyal, civil wars start when a new heir appears, vassals plot the downfall of the tyrant king, vassals have their own influence, etc.

I'm uncertain how many 'levels' of society I want (i.e. of the sort you've listed). For the time being (and I stress, for the time being) there are civilizations, and if a city/group breaks off, that becomes a new one. If a city rebels, that might be handled a little differently. These dynamics won't exist in the first alpha, but I'm still considering how I want to classify different levels/types of civilizations at the moment anyway.

This actually touches on one of my own ideas for a game (my own in the sense that nobody else who's thought it has followed through, anyway.) That is, instead of having perfect view of the battlefield you only have view of whatever is in line of sight, and only have direct control of units in earshot. You knowledge of the rest of the map would be based on scouting reports your other commanders gave you, and would be noted as being "x turns out of date" so you have a better chance to try and predict enemy movements. If you wanted to alter the battle plan mid-engagement you'd have to send messengers to those commanders, who may or may not disregard or alter those orders based on their own assessment of the engagement (they won't come to reinforce you if they're holding off a surprise rear assault, for example, and will instead ask you for help!)

"Their own assessment" of the engagement is the kicker, and would involve the commander's skill as a leader, personality traits, and perhaps a bit of how much he likes you/the person he's ordered to bail out. A big part of the game becomes cultivating a good staff of commanders you work well with, and matching up those commanders with the types of units and assignments they are best suited for. This then leads into a meta-game of recruiting/promoting promising officers, perhaps competing with other factions for talent. And intra-faction competition would be interesting as well- all kinds of possibilities there.

Re:Devblog, whee deities!

I'm pretty sure that's exactly how this game will work. The developer's stated that you'll need to send runners to your lieutenants in order to deliver orders in the middle of battle, and the lieutenants can override their orders if they think things aren't going well.

Yep : ). Your information goes out of date, and you need to renew it, and the better you are at commanding your soldiers and getting them to keep you up-to-date, the better. By contrast, if you're serving an army, your commands may sometimes seem 'outdated' if the commander is unaware of what's been happening in your part of the battle. There's a number of command skills, which I'll show when I upload a screenshot of the skills selection screen in the near future. Raising each one is independent, so you will become better at some and so will other commanders, which is exactly what you said about picking the right person for the job. Similarly, if you enlist, then you'll be assigned to whatever squad best suits your combat/command talents. Officers will definitely compete among each other if you're in charge, and if you're in an army, you might have to fend off others trying to advance their way up the tree too. As I think I said somewhere before, I want to get all intelligent creatures acting like 'adventurers', rather than just the player character. They have the same goals you do. Obviously that's a longer-term goal - at the moment I'm working on streamlining combat, damage, losing limbs, wielding weapons etc, and trying to get it sufficiently speedy that vast battles won't be slowed by it .

[varsovie]

and trying to get it sufficiently speedy that vast battles won't be slowed by it .

How do you optimize it?
Simply wise coding (bottleneck hunt), use of multi threading, use of GPU computing, use of assembly code, "simplification" of combats far away or even the creation of a new CPU with specific hardware acceleration for the game?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

and trying to get it sufficiently speedy that vast battles won't be slowed by it .

How do you optimize it?
Simply wise coding (bottleneck hunt), use of multi threading, use of GPU computing, use of assembly code, "simplification" of combats far away or even the creation of a new CPU with specific hardware acceleration for the game?

Mostly a bottleneck hunt, and I'm considering a simplification of combats that are far away. I'm looking into Python's multi-threading ability, but I don't think I'm going to go down that route.

[Lord Dullard]

and trying to get it sufficiently speedy that vast battles won't be slowed by it .

How do you optimize it?
Simply wise coding (bottleneck hunt), use of multi threading, use of GPU computing, use of assembly code, "simplification" of combats far away or even the creation of a new CPU with specific hardware acceleration for the game?

Mostly a bottleneck hunt, and I'm considering a simplification of combats that are far away. I'm looking into Python's multi-threading ability, but I don't think I'm going to go down that route.

It's ridiculously handy (the multi-threading, that is).

This is looking really cool. Can't wait to play. 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

It's ridiculously handy (the multi-threading, that is).

This is looking really cool. Can't wait to play. 

Is it? Interesting. Maybe I should look more into it... and thanks ! Gearing up for a week of pretty solid coding from Saturday onwards at the moment, by the end of which I'm hoping for a lot of progress on creatures/combat etc...

[fred1248]

So.. when will the game be released? 

[Frumple]

... alpha's been stated, repeatedly in this thread, to be anticipated as being release capable around the middle of the year; so summer-ish. Unless something comes up, which might happen, so no promises, only likelihoods. Search bar and reading is friend.

[Muz]

It's ridiculously handy (the multi-threading, that is).

This is looking really cool. Can't wait to play. 

Is it? Interesting. Maybe I should look more into it... and thanks ! Gearing up for a week of pretty solid coding from Saturday onwards at the moment, by the end of which I'm hoping for a lot of progress on creatures/combat etc...

These days, multithreading is almost a coding requirement. Core speeds won't be going up by much anymore, just the number of cores and multithreading efficiency will keep increasing.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

So.. when will the game be released? 

Yep, middle of the year-ish, for first alpha .

These days, multithreading is almost a coding requirement. Core speeds won't be going up by much anymore, just the number of cores and multithreading efficiency will keep increasing.

Intriguing. I'll look into it a lot more.

[varsovie]

These days, multithreading is almost a coding requirement. Core speeds won't be going up by much anymore, just the number of cores and multithreading efficiency will keep increasing.

Well, Core speed will continue to speed up... but mostly on high end CPU since Intel seems to fight on smaller and more low power CPU. But prefetch, better cache, technologies like "turbo boost" and maybe new instructions will help maintaining single core perf.

As for multithreading, use "import threading" in Py http://docs.python.org/library/threading.html. At first I recomande you to multithread only different part of your program ( like the logs, the UI, the music and the AI that aren't related ). Then you can monitor witch thread is the bottleneck, and try to make like one thread for ally AI, and another for the foe, then another for faraway combats. You know, with proper multithreading, my fortress in DF could at least three time bigger.